


Fifteen Sunrises

by Army_of_Dorkness



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Astronaut AU, Bisexual Bucky Barnes, Bisexual Steve Rogers, Bottom Steve Rogers, Bucky Barnes Remembers, Eventual Smut, M/M, Space AU, Space Race AU, Top Bucky Barnes, Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes, canon divergence - Steve Rogers is defrosted in the 1970s
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-10-30
Updated: 2017-02-23
Packaged: 2018-08-28 01:11:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 16,822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8424805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Army_of_Dorkness/pseuds/Army_of_Dorkness
Summary: Steve Rogers is discovered in the Arctic ice and defrosted in the early 1970s.  Per President Nixon's orders, he's sent on a mission to Skylab.  Publicly, the mission is meant to test how super-soldier physiology reacts to being in space.  Covertly, Captain Rogers is also tasked with installing a device intended to intercept Soviet satellite transmissions.  The USSR becomes aware of this secondary mission, and sends up a cosmonaut of their own to sabotage the device.  When the two men cross paths in the isolation of space, a shared history and long-suppressed passions lead them down a path that their respective governments never anticipated.
I am neither an astronaut nor was I alive during the 1970s, so expect plenty of scientific/historical inaccuracies.





	1. Compliance

“Red Star, come in.” 

“Are all communications systems online?”

“All systems are fully operational.” 

“Red Star, come in. I repeat, come in. Soldier, that is an order.” 

“Are you certain there are no malfunctions?” 

“Yes. All systems are fully operational. Comms are online.” 

“His handlers warned us this could happen, you know. Being off the ice for this long, exposed to such a powerful memory trigger—”

“Enough. We try another time. Then, we use the shutdown code.”

“Comrade, shutting him down at this point in the mission could be fatal.”

“Better men than him have died for the USSR in space. Try again. And if he continues to fail us, use the code.”

“Red Star, come in. This is your final chance. I repeat, Red Star, this is your final chance.” 

“You idiot! Don’t tell him that, he’ll know we’re about to—”

“He just switched off his comms. Comms are operational, but offline.” 

“Dammit, Widow! You can’t just tell him it’s his final chance! HYDRA is gonna have our heads!” 

“Sorry, I wasn’t thinking, I—” she lied.

“Shut up. Hopefully he returns to his programming soon. According to our briefing, he’s returned from lapses before. But if he doesn’t…” 

“But if he doesn’t?” she asked, raising her eyebrows.

“Anything could happen.” 

* * * 

**ONE MONTH PRIOR**

Steve shook his head. “I just don’t see why it has to be me, Mr. President. I’m sure there are plenty of people far more qualified than I am for this mission.” 

“SHIELD warned me you’d be like this. It’s not about your qualifications, Captain. It’s about sending a message.”

“I thought it was about running tests on how a super-soldier fares in space.” Steve crossed his arms. Something about this new president rubbed him the wrong way. He was no Roosevelt, that was for sure. President Nixon’s dark eyes scowled from under his brows, his posture slightly hunched as though he were concealing something. Steve’s intuition told him that the man couldn’t be trusted. 

“Well, yes, it’s about that as well, of course,” Nixon continued, leaning forward onto his desk. “But you see, it’s also crucial that we put the Space Race behind us once and for all. It’s too expensive to continue this kind of endless posturing. The Soviets need to see us demonstrate our absolute confidence in NASA’s advancements. And what better way to do that than to send one of our most valuable assets up to our new Skylab?”

The way people kept referring to him as a “valuable asset” made Steve grind his teeth, but he tried to conceal his annoyance. “And what about this other aspect of the mission I was briefed on?” 

“Ah, yes, that. All you’ll have to do is attach it to Skylab and turn it on. Of course, a space walk is no small matter, but if we’re sending Captain America to space, well… It’s simply a must. The public will want it.” 

“Mr. President, I want to know what this thing is, not just what I have to do to it.” Nobody had been willing to give him a straightforward answer to his questions about the specifics of his mission, and something about it made him uneasy. He couldn’t put his finger on precisely what gave him pause – he’d done plenty of missions before with less information than this – but he couldn’t shake the feeling that something was being hidden from him.

“Well, Captain, I’m afraid you don’t have the necessary security clearance for the full details.”

Nixon’s eyes shifted back and forth nervously. It was obvious from his body language that Steve intimidated him. Steve was experiencing that a lot lately – it wasn’t every day that a man who’d been presumed dead for nearly three decades got pulled out of the ice, alive and healthy. Frankly, he was still getting used to having a stature that could make other men feel small in comparison, but he decided to use it to his advantage. He might be dealing with the President of the United States, but he wanted a straight answer, not the endless obfuscations he kept hearing every time he asked what his mission would be. 

Steve took a small step forward – not enough to be overtly threatening, but just enough to emphasize his several inches of height and many pounds of muscle over the man before him. “Mr. President, I won’t do it if I don’t know what my mission is.” 

“Well, I… well, ah, I suppose I could tell you the gist of it, if it, ah, makes you more comfortable with the mission,” Nixon stammered. Steve watched beads of sweat form against the man’s hairline. 

“So, what’s the gist of it?” Steve prompted. 

“Well, it’s mostly Stark technology. Working on a contract between NASA and Stark Industries, you see. We’ve learned that the USSR has installed military functions in many of their satellites, under the guise of scientific research. This little device you’ll be installing has the ability to intercept an unprecedented amount of communications between Soviet satellites and the ground. It’ll help us covertly beat them at their own game.”

“To what end?”

“Deterrence, of course.” 

“Mr. President, I thought deterrence relied on the other side knowing what your capabilities are.” 

“Sometimes, Captain. But other times, it’s best for them to know _what_ we know, but not _how_ we know it.” 

Steve sighed. “I’ll be honest, Mr. President. I don’t particularly like this. I’m tired of being used as a weapon.”

“For a man who became what he is thanks to war, you sure seem to hate fighting,” Nixon said, his mouth curling into a thin approximation of a smile. 

“I never wanted to fight,” said Steve, looking out the window of the Oval Office, his mind drifting back to the Army examination rooms, the endless rejections stamped 4-F. “I saw what was happening over there, the way the Nazis stomped across Europe like it was their God-given right. I never wanted to kill anyone. But if it’s a choice between shooting an SS officer and letting good people lose their freedom or their lives – well, I hardly felt there was a choice at all. I had a duty to fight. I couldn’t allow myself to do anything less. Plenty of good men,” he felt the familiar waking nightmare wash over him, the vertiginous feeling of the train rushing along the edge of the cliff, his fingers so close, and if he could just lean another couple inches he’d have Bucky’s hand in his, but metal gave way and bile rose in his throat as Bucky’s scream cut through the howling wind… he took a deep breath, and continued speaking, trying to quell the shaking in his voice. “Plenty of good men died fighting for the world to be free. Who was I to do any less?” 

“But you didn’t die. And now you have the chance to keep fighting to make the world free.” 

“Mr. President, if I’m being honest, the fights today don’t feel quite so black-and-white.” 

“You woke up to a different world,” Nixon said with a sigh. “Things are more complicated now, I suppose. Sometimes you have to do something that feels wrong, that doesn’t feel so ethical, but it’s for the greater good. So you do it anyway.” 

Steve frowned. “I don’t know. I’m not so sure that’s the right way to go about things.” 

“Captain, don’t act like America was all moral righteousness during World War II. Did you ever ask Japanese Americans how it felt to live in internment camps?” 

“As a matter of fact, Private Morita told me plenty about how our government treated him and his family.” 

“And that didn’t give you pause?”

“Of course it did!” Steve gritted his teeth. He hated the way he was trying to get under his skin. And he especially hated how he was succeeding at it. “But what choice did I have but to keep fighting? I’m one man. I can’t right every injustice in the world, no matter how hard I try. I couldn’t even save my best friend’s life. But I’m sure you know that.”

“Everyone knows about Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes and his tragic sacrifice. Have you seen his section in the Smithsonian yet?”

“Of course I have.” Steve had gone as close to closing time as possible, hoping to avoid the crowds. He’d held it together until he came to the videos of the two of them laughing. He hadn’t wept like that since the days right after the train. “He hated being called James, you know. He was always Bucky to me.” 

“And do you think Bucky would want you to just sit back while the fate of the world hangs in balance?”

Steve realized his fists were clenched, and slowly loosened them. “Mr. President, I hardly think it’s fair to speak for the dead.”

Nixon shrugged and turned away, looking out the window. “I suppose I can’t argue with that. But there are plenty of young men just like Bucky dying in the jungles of Vietnam right now. Is it fair for you to turn your back on them?” 

Steve felt his hackles rising. “With all due respect, _Mr. President_ , I – I would never. I’m sorry. This is all just… it’s a lot to process. I lost almost three decades. It’s hard to know up from down. Everything is so…”

“So…?”

“I thought there would be flying cars. Instead, we made the atom bomb. Forgive me if I seem a little bit… disenchanted.” Steve sighed. Maybe all this suspicion, this strange twisting in his gut, was just a symptom of his time in the ice.

“Those bombs helped win the war you fought,” Nixon reminded him. 

“Maybe, but…” It all felt wrong. He remembered Bucky’s face at the World Exhibition of Tomorrow, smooth-shaved and glowing with youthful enthusiasm under his officer’s cap, eyebrows bouncing excitedly as smiled back at Steve after Howard Stark’s flying car sparked and fell. The future had felt so full of optimism and promise back then, as dark as the present had been. But the world of tomorrow that Steve had woken into was something very different from the one he’d always imagined. Absently, he wondered what Bucky would think of it all if he were still alive. 

“I’m not asking you to drop a damned nuke, Rogers. It’s a peaceful mission. Science, and a little bit of deterrence. Nothing to damage that squeaky-clean reputation of yours.”

Steve sighed. “I know, I just—”

“Your orders are to go to Skylab, carry out some tests, and activate that device. Understood?” 

Steve felt his shoulders sag, defeated. Nothing about the mission sounded outright unreasonable, aside from the fact that he was being sent on a solo mission to space. He couldn’t fully explain his reluctance, but his intuition blared alarms in his head. Something felt off about the whole thing, but without any substantiated objections, he could hardly disobey a direct order from the President of the United States. 

“Understood?” President Nixon stared him down, his eyes dark and commanding. 

“Yes, sir.” 

* * * 

“Soldier?”

“Ready to comply.” 

His eyes hazed in and out of focus, his handler’s face sharpening and blurring then sharpening again. Every sense needed its own adjustment period post-cryo. Reanimating a human body, even one as enhanced as his, was hardly an easy transition from deathlike stasis to waking. His tongue hung numb in his mouth, heavy and lolling, thick with the dusty-metallic taste of refrigerant. The most painful was regaining the sense of touch. The cold didn’t hurt until it began to fade away, and then it became excruciating. As his heart restarted and his body temperature climbed, the steady pulse of blood heating organs and limbs burned, as though his frozen body were being plunged into boiling water from within. He observed the pain neutrally, letting it run its course. Pain was only cause for concern if physical damage threatened his operational effectiveness. 

He moved his fingers experimentally, nerves remembering motion through the throb of warm blood. The restraints around his wrists held him to the chair, but he would be freed soon enough. First, he would receive mission directives, and then he would be granted full use of his body within mission parameters. 

His handler cleared his throat softly, shifting the little red book between his hands. He was new to this. The Asset could tell from the way his eyes flicked nervously as he spoke, lingering over the Asset’s left arm. “Your mission is extraction of a US spy device. We’ve received intel from multiple agents that the United States has plans to implant the device on the exterior of their Skylab orbital laboratory, under the guise of a purely scientific mission. You will disable the transmissions from the device and retrieve it to us. The Americans will not realize why transmissions have ceased until we have already unlocked the secrets of their device.” 

Had he been to space before? He couldn’t remember. Something in his sense-memory recalled the sensation of free-fall, but no true weightlessness, no absence of gravity’s inescapable pull. “Contingencies?” he asked.

His handler nodded. “In the event that the astronaut is still present at Skylab upon orbit synchronization, avoid detection if possible. Disable the device by any means necessary when the opportunity arises.”

“Is assassination authorized in the event of contingencies?”

“Assassination is authorized. Any lethal force must appear to be an accident. First priority is avoiding detection. The United States must not know that we know about this device. Self-destruction is authorized if it’s necessary for meeting mission parameters.” 

The Asset nodded. The four occupied cryo chambers, glowing amber in the cavernous room, reminded him that he was expendable, replaceable. He was aware, if only abstractly, that he’d once been a man like any other, his body made only of flesh, his mind governed by emotions and instincts rather than mission imperatives and combat training. Whoever he’d once been, that man might have feared death. But the Asset feared nothing. 

“Launch will be in thirty days. The first stage of the mission will be cosmonaut training.”

“I am ready to comply,” the Asset responded.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been doing a little casual reading about the Space Race lately and it's super-interesting, so naturally I began thinking to myself, "What if Steve and Bucky were part of the Space Race?" and that led me to start writing this fic. It's certainly a rather absurd premise, but I hope it's a fun read! As always, feel free to comment, and thank you for reading! :)


	2. Promises

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one's a bit more Bucky-centric than the last! I wanted to explore the possibilities of Bucky and Nat in the Red Room without giving them a full-fledged romance -- I've got nothing against BuckyNat, but I like keeping my OTP my OTP, ya feel? 
> 
> Sorry for how long this update took! The next one may be a week or so as well, because I'm going on a short vacation this week and will be afk for a few days. 
> 
> Thanks for reading, and as always, I love reading your comments if you wanna leave 'em!

**T-MINUS 47 HOURS, 26 MINUTES, 07 SECONDS**

Steve walked down the hall with long, purposeful strides, oblivious to the hurried clack of heels against the tile as Sharon struggled to keep pace. 

“Less than two days now, Steve,” she said. “You nervous?”

“Would it disappoint you if I said yes?” 

“I’d be more worried if you said no,” she said, throwing him a reassuring grin. “But don’t you worry. I’ll be on comms the whole time, so if you ever need a pep talk…”

Steve shook his head. “I’ll be okay. Believe me, they’ve been hammering every step of the mission into my head so often, I swear I could do it all in my sleep by now.” 

Sharon let out a little snort of laughter as she tugged down on her skirt, counteracting how it kept riding up as she extended her strides to match Steve’s hurried clip. She half-hoped he’d notice and slow down, but thus far he seemed completely unaware that his pace was unusually brisk. “Don’t tell Aunt Peggy that. She’d have a conniption.” 

“I wasn’t planning on it. She’s already none too thrilled that they’re sending me up in the first place.” 

That was an understatement. Steve had paid Peggy a visit shortly after SHIELD had released him from round-the-clock medical supervision. The visit had been… well, it had been a lot of things. Nice, mostly. But it had been awkward, too. There wasn’t exactly a playbook for “meeting up with the woman who’d almost-but-not-quite gone steady with you, except you got yourself frozen for almost three decades, so while it feels your promise to go dancing was made a few weeks ago on your end, she’s been living life with her husband for more than twenty years.” They’d shared some laughs and tears, and maintained the sort of affectionate distance that seemed appropriate given their unusual circumstances. 

But before he’d gone home, Peggy had grabbed both Steve’s hands in her own, and looked earnestly into his eyes. “Don’t let them make you do anything that foolish again,” she’d commanded, and even though whatever they’d almost had was long past, Steve felt unable to betray the will of those doe-wide brown eyes.

But here he was, off to do something arguably just as foolish as anything he’d undertaken during the War. What could he say? Old habits die hard, and soldiers must follow orders – even if Peggy Carter says otherwise. 

Sharon smiled, shaking her head fondly. Apparently, she was just as familiar with Peggy’s spitfire personality as Steve was. Ruefully, it occurred to Steve that she probably knew Peggy better than he did. After all, she was in her late twenties, and had known her aunt her entire life. Steve had only known her during the War.

“Don’t worry. I’m sure she’ll forgive you… eventually,” Sharon said with a smirk.

Steve sighed. “Sure hope so.”

“She will. Just remember to send her a Christmas card and all will be forgiven.”

“Oh?”

“Aunt Peggy _loves_ Christmas.”

“I’ll be sure to keep that in mind. I never knew…”

“Maybe she’s grown soft in her old age,” Sharon replied with a chuckle.

“Doubt it,” said Steve. “I’m sure under the tinsel and the boughs of holly, she’s still pure steel.”

“You’d best believe it,” said Sharon. “Anyway, shall we run over launch protocols a few more times?”

“If you insist,” Steve sighed.

* * *

“Again. Faster.”

The Asset leaned over the mock-up of the control panel, pressing the buttons in the sequence he’d memorized, his metal fingers clicking against plastic.

“Good. Again.”

The Asset obeyed, fingers flashing in a blur.

“Very good. I think it’s time for you to meet the agent who will be operating your comms.”

The Asset blinked, unsure of how to respond. Normally, his handlers spoke in direct orders. Whoever this man was, he seemed unfamiliar with the typical handler protocols, or simply uninterested in following them. Whatever the reason, it didn’t matter. The Asset would obey. He nodded slightly, assuming this to be the desired response. 

His handler’s tight-lipped smile indicated that the Asset’s response was satisfactory.

A woman strode into the room. She walked with a calculated, vulpine gait – one that she’d clearly adopted to conceal a background of extensive combat training. A civilian, or even a normal soldier, would be too focused on the balletic grace of her stride to notice the way her eyes flicked across the room, noting all available escape routes, or the way her muscles moved like pistons beneath her clothes. Ballerinas were strong, but not in the way she was – where they were sinuous, she was steely. Even the way she wore her hair seemed intended to conceal her martial nature. Blunt bangs fell just above her eyebrows, and she kept the rest of her red tresses bundled conservatively in a low ponytail. Simple and unthreatening – an almost schoolgirlish style – but practical in the event of an unexpected fistfight.

She cleared her throat, eyes flicking up to meet his. “Remember me?” she asked in a low voice.

He furrowed his brow, trying to remember. He came up with nothing. “No.”

She shook her head. “They really are as good as they say, I guess.”

The Asset frowned. 

His handler shot the woman a glance. “They told me that he’s less likely to have an… incident… if we avoid these sorts of discussions.”

“And they chose _me_ for a reason. I was put on this mission precisely because of our shared history,” she said, canting her chin upward stubbornly.

The Asset let out a grumble of frustration. Who the hell was this woman, and why did she keep talking about how she knew him?

“Watch it, Widow,” his handler cautioned the woman. “I read the briefings. I know how you two got in trouble.”

“Respectfully, I don’t think you know a damn thing about the Red Room.”

“I know _fraternizing_ isn’t allowed.”

“If you think that’s what happened between us, you understand even less than I gave you credit for,” said the woman.

“Frankly, I don’t care what you did and didn’t do. I’m just here to follow orders, and my superiors told me that you’re running comms. So if you undermine the mission, it’s your head that’ll roll, not mine.”

“Quit trying to scare me. It’s not going to work. Now let me have the room with him, so I can do my job.”

The Asset’s handler left in a huff, slamming the door behind him.

The woman looked into the Asset’s eyes, her lips pursed in thought. “You really don’t remember me at all?” she asked.

The Asset shook his head.

“Do you remember the Red Room?”

He could, if only vaguely. He remembered sparring, seemingly endless sparring. He’d taught his opponents, he recalled. All of them had been girls, or young women.

“It was the training center for the Black Widow program. I trained the students there.”

“You trained _me_ there.”

“Oh.”

“It was a few years ago. I came to you for advice. I wanted to learn how to fight like you, how to channel the kind of speed and force that you do. But the more I spoke to you, the more I realized you weren’t…”

“What?” he asked, puzzled. 

“Well, you were different. In combat, you were hard, ruthless, cunning. But when I talked with you, you seemed… lost. Like there was a side of you that nobody knew about. Maybe you didn’t even know about it. But you were patient, and _kind_ to me, and nobody is kind in the Red Room.”

“I am not kind,” he muttered.

The woman looked away. “You’ll remember,” she said, slowly. “You always do, eventually. That’s what they told us in the briefing.”

“I can better serve HYDRA if they keep my mind free of unneeded distractions.”

The Asset watched her throat bob as she swallowed. “You’re not just serving HYDRA this time. You’re serving the USSR. And they think I’ll be their best shot of keeping you under control if you remember… too much. So I hope you remember me soon, because my job will be a lot harder if you don’t.”

“I will do everything I can to succeed at the mission.”

“Good. But in the meantime, I guess I should… introduce myself to you. I go by Natasha now, but you’ll probably remember me as Natalia.”

“Natasha. I’m the Asset. Codename: Winter Soldier.”

Her eyes darted to the left. It was nothing more than a microexpression, but the Asset noticed it – he was trained to. And he knew that _she_ knew he’d see it, because she’d sure as hell had the same training. 

“You know my real name, don’t you?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“I don’t want to know it,” he said firmly. “It would only be a distraction from the mission. Do you understand?” 

“I– yes.”

“I do have one question, though.”

“Try me,” she replied.

“When my handler said ‘fraternizing,’ did he mean… were we… you know…?”

“It wasn’t like that,” she said. “It was the Red Room. Things like that don’t happen there.”

“They don’t,” he agreed. “It would compromise the mission-readiness of the Widows.”

“You remember _that_ ,” she said with a sad smile. “We became close. When they realized that we cared about each other, they decided that our friendship was a problem. So they took you away.”

“Personal connections are a liability,” he said, nodding. “That’s smart.”

“They’re a liability until they become useful. And this time, apparently it’s useful. So please try to remember me.”

He let out a grumble and looked away. 

“For the mission,” she reminded him.

“I will comply,” he said.

“Good. I’ll be back tomorrow. See if you can jog your memory by then.”

The Asset nodded.

“Goodbye, Winter Soldier,” she said, turning on her heels and walking out of the room with the same commanding gait she’d entered with. 

* * *

That night, lying awake in bed, Natasha’s mind spun with memories, recollections of the Red Room and the Winter Soldier pirouetting through her head in a frantic dance. One memory stood out, brought to the forefront by their conversation earlier in the day. _He doesn’t want to know his own name_ , she thought. _After everything they’ve done to him, he doesn’t even want to know who he is. Or at least, who he was. Did they erase him forever this time?_ The thought made her feel queasy. 

The memory from the Red Room that kept replaying in her mind stood out as clear as though it had happened yesterday. She’d heard a knock on the door of her room, and sprang to attention, expecting the headmistress. But the person who opened the door had been _him_. 

Her heart had given a little leap – yes, she’d undeniably had some sort of crush on him, because despite his unfashionably long hair and the half-vacant look that haunted his eyes more often than not, he was a handsome man. And he’d been kind to her, and that was… special. He was the first person she’d known in the Red Room who she could open up to. The Red Room wasn’t a friendly place, but somehow, they’d become friends. 

“Comrade,” she said, trying to hide her shyness.

“Natalia,” he replied, closing the door behind him. “I need to tell you something.”

“What is it?” she asked. She tried to gauge his face for cues as to what was on his mind. He looked… frightened. Vulnerable.

“I remembered something. Something big.”

Her eyes widened. He’d told her about the mind wipes, about the pain of the chair and the emptiness that followed. How the things that made him _him_ slipped through his grasp like water. “What did you remember?” she asked.

“My name,” he whispered. 

Her mouth fell open. 

“I need to tell you what it is. Sometime, maybe soon, they’ll wipe me again, and I’ll lose it. I—I always lose it.”

“I’ll keep it safe, I swear,” she promised him.

He stepped closer, his body so close to hers that she could feel the heat of his chest and smell the subtle musk of his anxious sweat. 

“My name, my real name, is James Buchanan Barnes,” he whispered to her, his breath warming her ear and tickling her hair. “But I always went by Bucky.”

He stepped back, and she looked up into his steel-blue eyes. “Nice to meet you, Bucky,” she murmured.

“Promise me you’ll remember. Promise me, please,” he pleaded. 

“I’ll remember. I promise,” she said solemnly. 

“They’ll take me away soon. I know it. They always do when I get like this.” He looked away, his face falling in resignation.

“I don’t want them to,” she replied. “You’re my only friend, Bucky, and I don’t want to lose you.”

“Personal connections are a liability. You know this,” he said, sighing.

This time it was her turn to look away, tears welling in her eyes. “I know,” she said.

“But no matter what happens, please remember my name. That way, if our paths ever cross again, and I don’t remember who I am, you can remind me.”

“I will. I promise,” she replied. 

He left her room as abruptly as he’d entered it. The next day, he was gone without explanation. But she’d known what had happened without being told. 

As sleep crept over her, and the stage of her mind began to draw the curtains on her memories of their Red Room _pas de deux_ , she wondered how she could fulfill her promise. _I’ll find a way, Bucky_ , she thought, _I’ll help you remember who you are. Some way, somehow, I’ll keep my promise._


	3. Memories

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm baaaaack! 
> 
> Sorry to anyone who's been reading and enjoying this for making you wait so long. November was a helluva month -- I was out of town a couple times (which was fun!), I got in two car accidents (neither of which were my fault, luckily, and neither of which caused me any injuries, also luckily), and worst of all, my country elected a fascist yam for president. 
> 
> Barring any unforeseen crises, I do plan on resuming my about-once-a-week update schedule. I hope anyone reading this enjoys this new chapter, and as always, do feel free to leave comments! :)

**T-MINUS 03 HOURS, 06 MINUTES, 49 SECONDS**

Steve let out a sigh, allowing his lungs to refill with muggy Cape Canaveral air. Soon, he’d be sealed tight in a spacesuit, breathing stale, meticulously processed air. Frankly, the labored breathing of the suit seemed almost more familiar than the easy rise and fall of his chest under the Florida sunshine. He’d spent more of his conscious life as a tight-chested asthmatic than he had as a super-soldier. He’d worn the suit plenty of times during training, and the artificial shortness of breath had brought his mind tumbling back to Brooklyn. He could almost smell the musty apartment he and his Ma had shared, could almost see Bucky running ahead of him on the playground and his heart thundering in his ears as he tried in vain to keep pace…

“Captain Rogers?”

“Yes?” he blinked, abruptly brought back to the present.

“Are you feeling okay?” the agent beside him asked. He was a young man, tasked by the Central Intelligence Agency with making sure Steve and his still-mysterious device made it into the capsule as planned. Steve knew him as Agent Miller. He was a good fellow, if perhaps a bit unsure of himself. His tie never seemed to hang quite straight, and his suit jacket was ever so slightly too wide in the shoulders, both of which only served to emphasize his youth. Steve liked the guy, despite Agent Miller’s connection to the spy device he still didn’t trust.

“I’m just fine. Just a lot on my mind, that’s all.”

“Well, I can hardly blame you, sir. It hardly feels like ‘one small step,’ does it?”

Steve smiled, shaking his head. “No. It really doesn’t.” 

“Are you ready to suit up, sir?” 

“Always.”

“I suppose I shouldn’t expect anything less from you,” the man said, losing some of his nervous formality.

“I just wish they’d let me take my shield.” 

“Sir, the weight of the payload has to be very carefully calibrated to ensure—”

“I was only kidding,” Steve interjected.

“Oh,” the man said, looking mildly embarrassed. “You know, the history books never mention this side of your personality.”

“What side?” 

“Well, if I may speak freely, sir…”

“Yes, of course.”

“You’re a bit… drier than I imagined.”

“I don’t know if the history books forgot to mention it, but before the serum, I was a scrawny little punk trying to hold his own on the mean streets of Brooklyn. If I couldn’t land a joke or two, I would’ve wound up six feet under long before Dr. Erskine made me six feet tall.” 

Agent Miller shrugged. “Makes sense, sir.” 

“Would you be willing to accept some unsolicited advice if I offered it?” Steve asked.

“I reckon I would, sir.”

“Whatever sense of humor you’ve got, hang on to it. The world’s a crazy place. If you can’t laugh sometimes, it’s easy to lose yourself.” 

Steve took in another deep breath of humid air. He hadn’t meant for his advice to be hypocritical, but he realized that it was. He still cracked deadpan jokes here and there, but he struggled to remember the last time he’d laughed. _Really_ laughed. He figured it must’ve been back sometime during the war. He flashed back to the Smithsonian exhibit. There’d been a film clip – just a short, grainy one, not very good quality – of him and Bucky, laughing together, Bucky bowing his head in that easy, free way that he did whenever something really cracked him up.

Steve wished he could remember the last time they’d laughed together. That was the horrible truth about special moments, he figured. Typically, you don’t even realize how special they are until they’re in the past, and by the time you realize how important they were, the memories are all fuzzy because you didn’t know to keep them fresh in your mind. 

He wondered what they’d been laughing about in that old film clip. He couldn’t remember at all.

* * * 

His head ached, but he ignored it. The pain was not mission-compromising; his body had experienced no damage. 

“They want me to run over launch protocols with you one more time before you leave for Baikonur,” said Natasha. “Are you alright?”

He blinked. “What?”

“I said, ‘Are you alright?’”

“I am prepared to function within mission parameters.”

“I meant, are you _feeling_ alright?”

“My feelings are subjective and have no bearing on my objective ability to complete my mission.” 

She shook her head. The mantra was familiar. She’d learned it, too, back in the Red Room. They’d drilled it into her head, right before they got to the training section on never, ever becoming emotionally compromised in the field. But the way he parroted the phrase, rote and robotic, drove a chill down her spine. “I’m not one of your HYDRA handlers, you know. Believe it or not, I do care how you feel.”

He stared at her, his face slack and confused. “I… I don’t know,” he finally muttered. 

“You don’t know how you feel?”

He looked away. “I don’t.”

Natasha nodded slowly. “That’s okay. You’ll figure it out, I think.”

“My head hurts,” he said abruptly. “But I’m not injured. I am still fully capable of performing within mission parameters.”

“I remember that your head hurt back in the Red Room sometimes.”

“It did? Was I still able to function normally?”

“Yes,” she said with a small smile.

“Good,” he replied. “We should run over launch protocols now.”

Natasha nodded. “Very well.” 

As they ran over launch protocols, Natasha’s mind raced circles around the tiny bit of information Bucky had just given her, retracing her memories and seeking patterns within them. Each time he’d mentioned having a headache back in the Red Room, he’d been on the cusp of remembering something about himself. She could only guess about the reasons behind the connection – perhaps it was related to his brain repairing broken neural connections, perhaps it was some layer of HYDRA programming to subtly discourage recalling his past – but headaches and remembering seemed to be undeniably correlated. 

She wondered what he would remember. She wondered if it would be enough. She wanted out – she knew that much – but she knew that Bucky was a loose end that she couldn’t bear to leave untied. No good spider would leave her web incomplete, so she hoped that he would find some way to break free before she defected. If not, he’d always be a question mark lingering amongst her regrets. And she had enough of those as it was.

* * * 

**T-MINUS FIVE… FOUR… THREE…TWO…ONE… LIFTOFF**

The rumble shook Steve down to his bones, his teeth rattling together in his skull. He felt the blast beneath him propel his capsule upward, the sensation of gravitational force pressing him heavily into his seat. 

It hadn’t really occurred to him before somehow, but in that moment, he realized that going to space was _dangerous_ , that he could very well never return from his mission. He remembered the grim certainty he’d felt as he nosed the Valkyrie down, down, down into the blank white expanse of the Arctic. He was well aware of his tendency to jump first and look later – doing the right thing was more important than considering the consequences it might carry. He also knew that this trait in him was part of why he’d been chosen by the SSR for the serum. But as he felt the shuddering inevitability of the rocket’s propulsion, he wondered if this time, maybe he should have asked more questions. Something inside him chided that he ought to have looked before he leaped. 

* * *

The wind blew hot and dusty across the steppe, the latticed metal towers of the cosmodrome looming above the plain like the skeletal remains of some forgotten monument. He walked towards the rocket that would soon launch him into space, flanked by handlers. 

He squeezed his eyes shut as a sharp bolt of pain shot through his forehead and his vision tunneled, and suddenly he wasn’t the Asset. 

He was in a classroom. Not a HYDRA training facility, but a classroom. There were words written on the chalkboard before him, printed in tidy English – not German, not Russian – “Romantic Poetry,” and a book sat on the desk before him. He looked down at his hands, both flesh and blood. His eyes widened. 

The woman at the front of the class gestured at the desk next to him. “Mr. Rogers, please read the poem on page seven for us.”

The boy looked up, blond hair flopping down onto his pale forehead. He gave a small sniff, and nodded. “Yes, ma’am.” He flipped through the pages of the book, his wrists moving birdlike and delicate. The boy cleared his throat. “I met a traveller from an antique land…” he began. 

He looked around, panic rising in his throat. This wasn’t a hallucination. It was a _memory_. His heart thundered in his temples as the boy next to him recited the final lines of the poem, “Nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.” The blond boy shot him a look as he spoke the final words, as though asking for approval. 

The teacher looked straight at him. He stiffened. “Mr. Barnes,” she said, “Please explain to us the dramatic irony of the inscription on the pedestal.”

And as suddenly as he’d flashed back, he was back in the present, his fists clenched and his forehead clammy. His handlers surrounded him, several of them with guns trained at him. 

“Stand down, soldier!” one of them barked. 

He raised his hands over his head. “I am ready to comply,” he said, his voice shaking in an unfamiliar way. Something inside him felt… uncertain. 

Two of his handlers began to whisper to each other, but not quite so quietly that he couldn’t make out what they were saying. 

“Is he fit to continue the mission?”

“It doesn’t matter. The launch is happening today, whether he’s fit or not.”

“If we lose him unnecessarily, HYDRA will—”

“Forget HYDRA, our superiors won’t allow us to cancel the launch.”

“But they warned us that if he began to remember, he could well become compromised, especially what with his target being—”

“It doesn’t matter. The launch goes forward. Now, Comrade.” 

“But…”

“That’s an order.”

The Asset shook his still-aching head. The words echoed through his mind. Who was Mr. Barnes? He looked out across the steppe, watching dust swirl in the wind. Something inside him was shifting, clicking into place like the plates of his left arm. But what it was, he couldn’t explain.


	4. Questions

Steve squeezed his eyes shut as gravity slipped away, the heaviness of his back pressing into the seat easing into weightlessness. 

_”Ground Control to Captain Rogers, do you read me?”_ Sharon’s familiar voice crackled through the comms. 

“I read you loud and clear, Agent Carter,” Steve replied. His stomach twitched. He wasn’t quite sure if it was the disorientation of zero gravity, or if it was the sudden realization that the last time he’d talked to an Agent Carter over comms, he’d been on what he believed to be a suicide mission, but he felt a bit queasy. 

_“How are you feeling?”_ she asked.

“Okay. A bit disoriented, I think.”

He heard a faint rustling through the comms – whether it was laughter or applause, he couldn’t quite tell. _“Perfectly normal. You should adjust within a few hours or so. Hang in there and keep an eye on the control panel, and we should have you docking in five orbits.”_

“Yes, ma’am,” said Steve.

This time, he definitely did make out a laugh. _“Don’t you start calling me that… It makes me sound like I’m Aunt Peggy’s age!”_

“Hey now, you’re saying that like it’s a bad thing.”

_“What? No, I didn’t mean it like—”_

“That’s enough, youngster,” Steve said with a grin. He had to admit it – he enjoyed teasing Sharon. He’d come to realize that she was unlike her aunt in many ways, but Sharon was built from the same steel that had made Peggy who she was. And if Peggy could do what she did during the War, then Sharon could handle a little ribbing now and then. 

Steve heard an exasperated huff through the comms. _“Alright. Time to focus. Keep a close eye on those controls, Captain Rogers.”_

“Yes, ma’am,” Steve replied, grinning to himself. 

* * *

The Asset flinched as his handlers fastened the spacesuit over his throbbing head, his growl of pain echoing back at him inside the concave dome of the helmet’s interior. Their voices were muffled, but he could still hear them talking. Talking, as usual, about him. 

“He’s not acting stable.”

“—Erratic is what he is—”

“HYDRA warned us that—” 

“It was probably the damned Widow, I always said she was more of a snake than a spider.”

“I hardly think it’s her fault, Comrade. He’s been out of cryo too long, once he starts to remember—”

He gritted his teeth against the pain, needle-sharp against his skull. He wished they’d just shut up, put him in the goddamn Soyuz, and let him complete his mission. He was fully mission-ready. The pain was not compromising. He would not allow it compromise him. 

He turned his attention back to his handlers. 

“—Orders are orders. We have to launch. Today. It’s not like we could just wipe him anyway. We’d have to re-brief him, make sure he remembers how to operate the controls… there’s no way we’d get approval. Get him prepped for launch.” 

Two of his handlers grabbed his arms, leading him towards the looming rocket. The thought popped in his head, uninvited, that he could easily overpower his handlers. Only two of them were armed. Throw the man at his left a few meters, easily, with his bionic arm, grab the man on the right and use him as a human shield to buy himself a couple seconds, wrest one of the guns away, neutralize them all… 

No. He was the fist of HYDRA. He obeyed orders. He would not fail his mission, and he would certainly not disobey his handlers. 

_Why?_ his inner voice asked. _What have they ever done for you?_

Well, they had given him his glorious purpose, for one. He was tasked with making the world more orderly, eliminating threats to HYDRA’s plan for a world without conflict.

_These men aren’t even HYDRA._

It didn’t matter. HYDRA only allowed him to go on third-party missions if they coincided with their own goals. 

_And anyway, why does HYDRA tell you their goal is peace, when they’ve put so much blood on your hands?_

Ugly means could lead to noble ends. Threats to HYDRA were like a cancer. They would grow and spread and kill the world if they weren’t eliminated. 

_But if HYDRA’s so infallible, why do they have to keep your name a secret? If they have nothing to hide, then why can’t you know who you are?_

As he ascended to his seat in the capsule, he realized that he didn’t have an answer. 

* * * 

As Steve floated through the hatch into Skylab, he found himself struck once again by the strangeness of it all. He’d grown up in a musty Brooklyn tenement with a shared bathroom down the hall, and he’d woke to a world where it seemed that everyone and their uncle had a television in their homes. 

That, and he was in _space_.

More than anything, he wished Bucky could see him now. He’d always thought it was a bit ironic how he’d ended up being the one to get selected for the Super-Soldier Serum, when Bucky had always been the one who’d grabbed Steve excitedly by the arm and dragged him to the newsstand the sneak glimpses of headlines like **HOWARD STARK UNVEILS LATEST INVENTION** printed in bold letters on newspapers they couldn’t afford. In fact, he’d never have met Dr. Erskine if not for Bucky’s insistence that they go check out the World Exposition of Tomorrow on his last night in New York. He remembered looking up at the back of Bucky’s head – he’d been too short back then to get a good look at the stage – and seeing that strong back stand tall with excitement as he watched Stark’s prototype, his broad shoulders filling out that smart brown uniform so confidently, like he was born to wear it…

But Bucky was gone now. He kept having to remind himself. It all felt fresh – to him, it hadn’t even been a year since the train. But some part of him couldn’t believe it. Refused to. Like how he’d felt when his ma died, like she was just about to come home, that he’d hear the familiar click of her key unlocking the door and she’d step inside, snow melting into her hair and her cheeks flushed and _alive_ , and he’d realize the tuberculosis and the consumptive ward and the doctors delivering the bad news had all been some long nightmare.

Despite the familiarity of the feeling – his mind’s inability to accept that he was really, truly gone – this felt different. Nagging. Like a question he knew he needed to ask, but he’d forgotten what it was. 

He shook his head. He needed to focus on his mission, not get himself lost in foolish thoughts of seeing blue-gray eyes just one last time… 

_“Captain Rogers, come in. Do you read me?”_

“I read you, Sharon. Loud and clear.”

_“How are you feeling?”_

“Pretty good,” he replied. “Still getting the feel for this whole zero-gravity thing.” He drifted towards a wall and extended his arm to catch himself, but pushed off with a bit too much force and found himself ricocheting towards the opposite side of the room. “I feel like a ping pong ball rattling around in a tin can.” 

_“Don’t worry, you’ll get the feel for it soon. And you’d better, because they’ve rescheduled your EVA for three hours from now.”_

“What? Why?”

_“They won’t say. It’s above our classification, but apparently it’s imperative that you do your spacewalk soon.”_

Steve frowned. This almost certainly meant that the Soviets knew about the device. He could only guess what they were planning to do about it. “Ah… alright, then. I’ll try to get my bearings for now.”

_“Well, if Aunt Peggy knows anything at all, you’re the best man for the job.”_

“I’ll try not to let her down.”

* * * 

The Asset squeezed his eyes shut as the rocket’s blast propelled him upward, his guts pulling into his spine as gravity fought his ascent. Something was wrong. Not with the launch. With himself, and his throbbing head. 

They told him he was an avenging angel. A weapon for the greatest good. But he wasn’t some force of nature, inevitable and unstoppable. He was flesh and blood welded with metal. Nothing more than a man. Perhaps, even less than a man. 

As he felt himself begin to float against his seat rather than weigh heavy in it, his vision began to tunnel again. He tried to fight back, but it washed over him all the same. 

He was at the crest of a rollercoaster, carnival lights flashing and twirling below him. A girl sat beside him, hair in carefully done-up curls, biting her lip in nervous anticipation of the fall, her teeth smearing her crimson lipstick. He glanced to the row behind them, making eye contact with that same blond-haired boy from the classroom, who currently looked more than a little green around the gills. 

He felt his lips curl into an impish grin, and his stomach catapulted into his throat as they fell, fell, fell…

And suddenly he was lying in snow, fading in and out of consciousness. He could barely turn his head, but he could see the red stain of blood spreading across the white, radiating out from the socket of gore where his left arm had been. 

Footsteps padded muffled through the snow, and he saw that familiar face behind round glasses, and he saw Zola’s mouth curl into a smile. As his first handler bent over his broken body, he heard him whisper in his ear, voice dripping with malice, “Das Spiel ist aus, Amerikaner.”

He snapped back as Natasha’s voice came through his comms. _“Red Star, come in.”_ His mission codename. He shook his head, trying to reorient himself. Had he been American?

“Ready to comply,” he responded without having to even consider the words. 

_“We’ve received intel that the Americans know we’re planning to interfere with the device, so they’re considering accelerating the installation process. Your new orders are to kill the astronaut and disable the device, ideally while he’s still on his EVA.”_

“Consider it done,” he muttered into his microphone. 

He flipped through the book of control codes, preparing to connect to Skylab. But as he turned the pages, something caught his eye. It stood out from the printed numbers and Cyrillic letters around it, handwritten in English. He recognized the handwriting – it belonged to Natasha, beyond a doubt… but how had she written it there?

**Your name is Bucky Barnes.**

* * * 

Steve floated forward, tethered to Skylab, but still feeling as though he could drift away at any moment. He might have been terrified if it wasn’t so breathtakingly beautiful. Earth slid by below him, marbled blue and white and green. All around him, the stars burned against the endless black, each pinprick of light a reminder of how miniscule the planet below him truly was. 

As he set to work affixing the device on the exterior of Skylab, something caught his attention out of the corner of his eye. Something – some other craft – was somehow latched on to his own capsule, and another astronaut floated towards him, tethered to his own long cord. 

No. He wasn’t an astronaut. He was a cosmonaut. 

Steve blinked, disbelieving. The cosmonaut drifted towards him, left arm outstretched. As they collided, the man seized Steve’s wrist through his spacesuit, pulling them together. The cosmonaut’s helmet floated inches from Steve’s own, and the man glared in at him with emotionless, violent blue-gray eyes. 

Steve felt his stomach drop, even in weightlessness. He had to be hallucinating. He had to be. 

“Bucky?” he whispered, incredulous. The cosmonaut with Bucky’s face stared back, unhearing and unyielding.


	5. Mutiny

The cosmonaut with Bucky’s eyes never broke eye contact, but reached for Steve’s tether, his fist tightening in his suit’s glove. Steve became acutely aware that the tether was the only thing preventing him from drifting away into nothingness and slowly suffocating in his helmet as his oxygen depleted away. 

“Houston, we have a problem,” he spoke urgently into his comms.

_“We hear you, Captain Rogers. What’s happening up there?”_

“I… this sounds crazy, but I’m not alone up here. The Soviets, they sent someone up too, and I think he’s trying to kill me.”

The cosmonaut’s eyes flashed, and his grip on Steve’s wrist tightened. Steve could feel his suit begin to buckle under the pressure. One tiny puncture, and it would all be over.

_“Ste— Captain Rogers, did I hear you correctly? A cosmonaut is up there trying to… kill you?”_

“And I swear I’m not losing my mind, but – get this – he looks just like Bucky.”

_“Steve, he – wait, what? – calm down, this is probably just some unknown side effect of the serum or being frozen for so long—”_

“I’m not hallucinating.”

_“Wait—hold on. Another agent is here. He’s CIA. He’s telling—he’s telling me they had intel, this this could happen. Ah, Christ…”_

The cosmonaut tugged Steve’s tether, knocking their helmets together. Steve could see the man’s lips move, presumably as he talked to Soviet ground control. Those eyes glared into Steve’s, their shape and color familiar, but the expression alien – hostile and animalistic, cold and unfeeling as Arctic ice. Yes, he had Bucky’s eyes. But the warmth behind them was missing. 

“Talk to me, Sharon. I’m gonna have to fight him, and it’s awfully hard to carry on a conversation when—”

_“—Captain Rogers. An agent just told me you’re likely dealing with the Winter Soldier.”_

“The what?”

_“There’s no time to explain. But he’s – well, we didn’t know he was real, but we did know that if he is, he’s dangerous.”_

“He _is_ trying to kill me.”

_“I know, so fight back! I know you can beat him, Steve, even if they say—”_

Whatever words of encouragement Sharon was offering, they turned into a hiss of static as the cosmonaut’s fist let go of his wrist and flew against Steve’s helmet. Steve began to drift back from the force of the impact, but the cosmonaut’s grip on his tether snapped him back towards his familiar-looking foe. He extended his arms, and grasped forward, seizing the man by the shoulders of his suit.

* * * 

_“Red Star, come in. Status report.”_

“Target is fighting back,” he replied as the astronaut clamped his hands onto his shoulders. 

_“Be advised that your target is significantly enhanced.”_

He yanked the astronaut’s tether, which seemed to make the man nervous. Nervous enough to loosen his grip slightly. The Asset curled his legs towards his chest and loosened his grip on the tether, kicking into the astronaut’s stomach. His target shot away, until he tightened his grip on the tether. The American floated a few yards away, looking disoriented.

_“Red Star, come in. Have you been receiving my… my messages?”_

Her stutter was calculated, he knew. When a Widow spoke, nothing was accidental. He closed his eyes momentarily, and her writing burned itself into his retinas. His name, weighing heavy on his tongue, like a familiar phrase translated into an unknown language. 

“Yes.”

But who the hell was Bucky Barnes? And even if he knew, would he ever be that man again? 

The astronaut had begun to return by pulling himself hand-over-hand along his tether, moving with care to avoid too much momentum. 

_“Your target has substantial enhancements to his strength and speed. I strongly advise that you use the zero-gravity conditions to turn those assets into disadvantages.”_

He felt his vision tunneling. No, not now, not in the middle of a fight… 

But suddenly, he was looking up at the rafters of a bunker ceiling, cold operating table metal against his back, chilling him even through his shirt, and as his vision blurred and his eyes slipped shut, he heard the thud of approaching footsteps. Footsteps meant experiments, torture, needles and vials and scalpels.

But the voice accompanying the footsteps wasn’t one he expected. It was one he knew, that he hadn’t heard in what felt like eons. He opened his eyes, and saw a strong-jawed face and broad shoulders leaning over him – he almost didn’t recognize the man, until he saw the concern creasing around those cornflower blue eyes, and then he _knew_ him. 

“Steve.”

And as suddenly as he’d flashed back, he was back in the present, the astronaut on top of him, pinning him to the side of Skylab. The American stared down at him, and as they looked into each other’s eyes, the Asset drew in a sharp breath.

Behind the helmet, those same cornflower blue eyes.

_“Red Star, come in. I repeat, come in. Do you read me?”_

“Yes,” he replied, his mind reeling, even as the astronaut held him firmly in place. His body knew he should be reaching for his knife right now, that he should be taking advantage of this moment to puncture the American’s suit and let the vacuum of space suck the life from his target. 

Something stilled his hand. 

He knew those eyes. 

“Natasha,” he murmured, knowing that using her name was a breach of protocol, but not caring. “Who is my target?”

_“That’s classified.”_

“I know him.”

He looked into the man’s eyes, searching for meaning in the irises, for some subtly written clue to unlock.

_“You need to focus on your mission.”_

“I know him. From before. I think his name is… Steve.”

The silence over the comms hung dull and deafening in his helmet. Natasha might’ve been on his side, but she could only do so much to protect him in a room full of his handlers. He knew exactly what they were going to do. He didn’t have long.

_“Red Star, come in.”_

He needed to disable the comms. He was on the edge of something. He could feel it. Memories hung palpable, just beyond reach. The man before him, struggling to restrain him against Skylab, might have the answers he sought. Maybe, just maybe, he knew who Bucky Barnes had been.

_“Red Star, come in. I repeat, come in. Soldier, that is an order.”_

The comms fed into his ear, the wire against his neck. If he snapped his head to the side hard enough, perhaps he could break the wire. But it was going to hurt.

_“Red Star, come in. This is your final chance. I repeat, Red Star, this is your final chance.”_

Now or never. He snapped his neck to the side as violently as he could. He felt his skull crack against the inside of his helmet, and the wire sparked against his throat, and everything went dark. 

* * * 

“What the—?” Steve trailed off, baffled by the now-unconscious cosmonaut floating ragdoll-limp before him. 

_“Captain Rogers, talk to me. What’s happening up there?”_ Sharon’s voice was steady, but Steve could sense the panic underneath. He could only imagine the tension in the room at Ground Control. 

“Well, he was fighting back. Then he kind of froze up and… I think he just knocked himself out?”

_“Am I hearing that right? He knocked himself out?”_

Steve looked down at the cosmonaut. As his face hung soft and slack with unconsciousness, he looked more like Bucky than ever. But Bucky had never let his hair grow so long. And Bucky had none of the hardness of this man’s face. Even after the POW camp, he’d never looked so—

_“Captain Rogers, do you read me?”_

“Yes. Sorry, I just… I can’t get past his face, it looks so much like—”

_“Steve. Captain Rogers. Listen carefully. Ground Control just got off the phone with President Nixon. The Winter Soldier is one of our top targets. He’s been impossible to catch, or even begin to pursue. Your orders are directly from the President, do you understand?”_

“Of course. But what are my orders?”

_“I’m warning you, you might not like them.”_

“Just tell me what they are.”

_“Your orders are to kill the Winter Soldier.”_

Steve felt a chill creep down his spine. He looked down at the unconscious man floating before him, the man who, against all odds, wore Bucky’s face. 

“No. I won’t do it.”

_“These orders are from the President, Steve.”_

“He’s unconscious. I have him on the ropes, Sharon. And I want answers. I want to know why the Soviets sent up a man with my… my best friend’s face to fight me. I’m not killing him.”

_“Steve, do you realize what you’re doing? This is mutiny. I know that these are difficult orders, but—”_

“Did Peggy ever tell you about my first mission?”

Silence over the comms. 

“I was supposed to keep singing and dancing. They were gonna leave those POWs to die. But I knew, somewhere deep down in my heart, that there was still a chance. That I could save them, save Bucky… so I snuck off and did what I had to do. I’ve seen the way you all remember me. Captain America, Super-Soldier. But you’ve all forgotten who I am.”

_“Steve, please, the President is back on the line—”_

“I’m the scrawny little punk who lied, over and over and over, just to get himself enlisted. I’m the dancing monkey who disobeyed a commanding officer to rescue those POWs. I’m not a man who blindly follows orders. I fought enough men like that during the War to know that being a good soldier isn’t enough to absolve your soul. And I will not kill this man. Not now. Not like this.” 

He heard a shuffling through the comms, and Sharon’s voice was replaced by an unfamiliar man’s. He ignored it. Carefully, he pulled the cosmonaut along with him to the hatch of Skylab. 

* * * 

His eyes flickered open. Cautiously, he noted that the throbbing in his head had subsided. He felt a moment of panic as he realized that he was out of he wasn’t wearing his helmet, his hair drifting freely around him. 

The blue-eyed man floated over him, concern creasing his face. 

He squeezed his eyes shut, and could almost feel that operating table below him again. 

“Steve?” he murmured. “That’s your name, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” 

“I used to be someone else. I want you to help me remember.”

“I’m looking for some answers, too. Like why do you look just like Bucky?”

He swallowed, looking away. “I don’t know. But that was my name too.”

The American’s eyes glimmered with a flood of emotions. “Wait. Are you saying that you’re… you’re…”

“I don’t know. But before all of… this, my name was Bucky Barnes. And I want to remember who he was. Can you help me?”


	6. Boundaries

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the slow update -- holiday preparations have been eating up all my free time! I hope you enjoy this chapter. It's a slightly longer one, so I hope it's worth the wait. :)

The Red Room taught plenty of spy tricks, but there was one skill in particular that all good Widows had to master – knowing when their cover is blown. Even the most lethal assassin, the most stealthy saboteur, or the most seductive honeypot loses her advantage when her true mission reveals itself to her target. 

Now, as she retreated to the restroom to “compose herself,” as she’d told her comrades in the command room, she could practically hear the Headmistress’s words echoing in her head.

“Natalia, you dance beautifully. But there is more than learning to dance. You must learn how to leave the stage. No dance lasts forever, little spider. Remember that.”

This dance was over. She knew it was only so long before they began connecting the dots, realizing her role in the Winter Soldier’s rebellion. Not that she wanted to stay, particularly. She couldn’t remember a time before the Red Room, not really. She’d been very cold, and very alone, and then she’d had a bed and a Headmistress and a purpose. And sure, it was a violent and unfeeling purpose, but it had been _hers_. 

She’d never questioned it until… well, until the Winter Soldier. He’d been so much like her – all programmed violence and emotionless efficiency. And at first he’d been such a flawless machine, but then it all started to crack apart. Beneath the façade, he was a man. A man who knew fear and kindness and maybe even love. 

And if the Winter Soldier – that fabled, monstrous, killing machine – could have a good man underneath him, then what was underneath the Black Widow? She’d spent many sleepless nights wondering. She knew HYDRA had picked Bucky for more than just his previous enhancements on Zola’s surgical table. It had been a game to them. Take Captain America’s best friend, transform him into a brainwashed HYDRA assassin. Exactly the sort of perverse laugh they liked best. 

But why had she been picked for the Red Room? There were plenty of orphans – why her? Had she simply been convenient? Or worse, had the Headmistress seen an innate cruelty in her that she wished to refine? 

She couldn’t remember who she’d been. And she’d never get a chance to learn who she could be if she stayed. In the bathroom stall, she changed clothes, pulled on a blonde wig, and clipped her forged credentials onto her jacket. It was time to leave. Natalia Romanoff would have a hard time leaving the building, let alone crossing into West Germany. But for a soft-spoken, blonde courier from East Berlin named Nele Vogel, it would be a far easier task. 

Maybe she’d never learn who she’d been before the Red Room. But with any luck, once she defected, she’d get the opportunity to learn who she could become after it. 

* * * 

Steve extended his hand slowly, as though he was reaching for a cat he wasn’t sure was friendly. “Buck, I – I watched you fall. You—you died. You were _gone_. How—?”

“I’m not sure,” Bucky replied. “I only remember moments, like scenes from a— a newsreel or somethin’. I remember that I fell, and I remember how cold the snow was, and the blood, and Zola standing over me. And then the procedures started, and it’s all blurry. Like a dream.”

Steve felt sick. “You fell all that way and you didn’t die?” _He didn’t die, and you never even looked for him_ , his conscience hissed from the back of his mind. Sergeant Barnes had been declared Killed in Action, his body unrecoverable. He’d become a name engraved in granite, a headstone marking an empty coffin. A ghost twice over.

Bucky shook his head. “You don’t understand. I’ve died lots of times. That was just the – the first death, I think. If they did it before, I don’t remember.”

“ _Jesus_ , Buck…”

“It doesn’t hurt. It’s the coming back that hurts.” 

“You said Zola— did HYDRA do this to you?” 

Bucky hesitated, biting his lip and looking away. “Yes.” 

“Oh, Buck…” Steve murmured, putting his hand gently against Bucky’s shoulder. 

Bucky flinched away, the force of his reflex drifting him away from Steve. 

“Sorry, I mean, God— Buck, I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry,” Steve blurted out.

“Look,” Bucky replied slowly, “I know you think you know me. But you don’t. Whoever Bucky Barnes was, I’m not him any more. I’m something else now.”

Steve shook his head. “No.”

“What the hell do you mean, ‘no?’” he asked, looking genuinely perplexed.

“I mean, I can’t accept that. The Bucky I knew, he was a fighter. He had more fire in ‘im than anyone I knew. Not a damn thing HYDRA comes up with could erase that. I _know_ it.”

“You don’t know the first goddamn thing about what HYDRA’s capable of,” Bucky hissed. 

“Maybe not,” Steve replied, steeling his jaw. “But I know all about what you’re capable of.” 

“That’s impossible.”

“No, it’s not. Buck, we grew up together. We went to war together, we—”

“No. You. Don’t. Understand,” Bucky spat each word, his eyes flashing with anger, although who it was directed at, Steve couldn’t tell. “Do you think I’m capable of killing a man in cold blood? Do you think I’m capable of serving HYDRA? Do you think I’m capable of following Arim Zola’s orders some sorta puppet? Do you think I’m capable of _that_?”

“I—” Steve stammered.

“I’m not the man you knew. Not anymore.” 

Steve gritted his teeth, waves of emotion crashing over him faster than he could catch his breath. “Okay. Okay, Buck. HYDRA, they – they did things to you. And you’re not the same. But you remember. Just bits and pieces, but you do remember.”

Bucky nodded reluctantly. 

“And you didn’t kill me. And you want me to help you remember more.”

Bucky nodded again, with slightly more enthusiasm. 

“Okay. How?” 

“Tell me everything. Like a – a mission report of our lives. Things keep reminding me of moments, I get little fragments. But I want the whole thing. I feel like a statue that’s all broken to bits and forgotten, and I want to know what I looked like, back when I was whole.”

Steve frowned. “That’s a weird way of talking about yourself, Buck.” 

“I don’t know. I don’t know how people talk about themselves. Gotta learn that, too, I guess. I just remembered the image from a poem. It was one of the first things that came back to me. Hell if I know why, though.”

“I know the one. ‘Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair,’ and all of that.”

“I remember the classroom. And there was a boy. He was you, but so much… smaller?”

“You don’t remember what happened to me?”

Bucky looked away, his face wilting into a pout.

“That’s just fine, Buck,” Steve assured him. “I’ll tell you all about everything. It’ll be like a story.”

Bucky nodded, the corners of his mouth lifting slightly. 

“Alright. Where do you want me to start?”

“At the beginning.”

* * * 

Natasha approached the gate separating East from West, driving a delivery truck she’d carefully procured. This would be the riskiest moment of her journey. By this time, she was surely a wanted woman. Her unexplained disappearance, combined with the Winter Soldier’s erratic behavior, would surely have raised some alarms. The GDR’s border guards had surely been sent her photo and told to detain her. Luckily, they were expecting a Russian redhead, not a German blonde. It was amazing what a good wig and a plausible backstory could help a woman get away with. 

She sat in the line of cars at the border, breathing slowly in through her nose, out through her mouth, keeping her shoulders low and relaxed. She would be just fine; everyone knew delivery drivers got through to the West easily enough. A truckload of cabbages wasn’t likely to raise suspicion. 

She gathered her forged papers as she approached the checkpoint. A guard gestured for her to roll down her window. She complied. 

“Papers, please,” he said. He gave her a toothy smile that never reached his eyes, and looked her up and down through the truck window. 

“Of course,” she replied with a purposefully bland smile. 

He shuffled through the papers, occasionally pausing to inspect a section or cast her a pointed glance.

“Hmm,” he grumbled. “So you’re delivering cabbages today?”

“Yes. Nobody grows cabbages as lovely as my these. Even people in the West want them.”

“Hmm. Yes, I see them in the back, there. They look lovely. I’ve never heard of your cabbages before, Miss Vogel.”

He was asking for a bribe, she was sure of it. Whether he wanted some cabbages, or something more valuable, she couldn’t tell. But she’d figure it out. 

“They’re delicious. And huge. One cabbage will make days’ worth of stew.”

“Is that so?”

“Would you like to see for yourself? Perhaps you’d like some cabbage to take home to your family?” 

“My wife would quite like that, yes.” 

“Very well.” She opened the driver’s door and jumped out of the truck cab, and circled to the back of the truck bed, rolling a couple of the big red cabbages into her arms, their leaves mottled purple-blue and slightly bruised from the bumping of the truck. 

“These are lovely,” he said, stamping her papers. “Drive safely, Miss Vogel.” He handed her the documents and took the cabbages in his arms. 

She was just beginning to step into the cab of the truck when she heard running footfalls and yelling behind her. 

“Stop! Don’t open the gate for her! KGB!” 

_Shit._

She scrambled to turn the key in the ignition, her body halfway into the door. It was a big truck – it might be able to ram through the gate. But it was too late. An agent grabbed her jacket, and she shrugged free, and another went for her hair, looking concerningly unsurprised when the wig came free into his fist. 

“What’s going on?” the border guard asked, still cradling his cabbages.

“While you were busy thinking about damned vegetables, we were doing our jobs. This woman matched the description for a rogue agent, which you would have known about if you ever read the bulletins at the beginning of your shift.”

The border guard slunk away, looking more wilted than a bowlful of rotkohl. 

Natasha put her hands up against the truck. There were two agents. Clearly both KGB. One was young, clearly muscular under his jacket, but perhaps without much field experience. The other was a bit older, perhaps in his forties, with the neglectful beginnings of a beard, and the bloodshot eyes and slight puffiness of an unhealthily heavy drinker. The first agent would be easy enough to take down – strong young men never expected a petite woman to fight back against them, and certainly not a petite woman with Red Room combat training. The second man would be more difficult, perhaps. He’d clearly seen his fair share of action. And he looked like a man who’d seen enough to know not to hold his punches. 

She only had moments, she knew. Soon, the humiliated border guard would return from his office, a gun in his hand instead of cabbages, and she’d be looking at escaping with a few gunshot wounds – if she was lucky. 

“Miss Romanoff, you will come with us,” said the older agent. 

“You know, I really wish I could,” she began, kicking back to land her heel squarely in the older agent’s crotch, and spinning into a roundhouse kick to the neck of the younger agent. “But I really have to go.” The younger agent staggered back, finding a seat dizzily against the curb. The older agent’s face was beet-red and he looked on the verge of being ill, but Natasha saw his hand reaching for his gun. She grabbed for his wrist, and swept a kick into his ankles, knocking him to the ground. 

He looked up at her as she stomped his right wrist, his cry of pain telling her she’d successfully broken the bone. 

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know you’re doing your job, but I can’t have you shooting me on my way out.” 

She turned to the young agent, who looked too shocked at her brutality to react. “Toss your gun away, and your wrist stays intact.” 

He nodded and slid a pistol into the road. She kicked it away. 

“The West will never want you, you crazy bitch!” the older agent spat at her.

She turned to him as she walked towards the vehicle gate, and freedom. “I’m tired of worrying about what governments want. So if they won’t take me, I’ll make my own way.” 

“You’re a Black Widow! No one will ever trust you! Never! They ought to shoot you on sight, you lying, scheming little—”

She ducked the arm of the vehicle gate and stepped out from under the bridge, into the soft gray sky of the same city, but a different world. The man’s words were venom, but she remembered her promise to Bucky. He had shown her that she was better than she’d known, that even weapons could find gentle souls within them. And she’d kept her promise. She didn’t know who she was, she didn’t know she might become, but she knew this much – she could keep a promise. She strode into West Berlin, her head held high. 

* * * 

“Okay, Buck. I think that about covers grade school.” 

“Alright. It’s still a bit blurry. I don’t remember everything, not yet.”

“That’s okay. I think most people don’t remember everything from grade school.”

Bucky frowned. “But it’s imperative to preserve memories. For mission reports, and for… remembering. Like now.”

“Memories aren’t perfect, Buck. We aren’t made to remember everything exactly as it happened. I think if I could remember everything, every moment, exactly as it happened, I might lose my mind.” He recalled how in the days after the train, if he so much as blinked, Bucky’s grasping hands, his body tumbling into the void, reached out for him again. How he woke up screaming some nights. If the details never faded, soft and sepia, from the horrors of his life, they might tear him to pieces. 

Bucky shrugged. “So what comes next?” 

“We were teenagers. I was still skinny and gangly and small, and you got big and strong. I was… well, I was jealous. All the girls thought you were the handsomest thing they’d ever seen. You were still real nice to me, though. All through the summer we’d go down to Coney Island and—”

“What’s Coney Island?” 

“Oh, sorry. It was a boardwalk, and an amusement park. We’d go on all sorts of rides and spent all our money on hot dogs and carnival games. You were the best damn shot, though, Buck, even before you went off to Basic, and you’d always win at ring toss. You were always winning, so much that the barkers started tryin’ to chase you away because you’d end up with all the prizes. But you just kept winning, and you’d always give some pretty girl the stuffed animal or whatever it was that you won. You were always trying to impress them, and it always worked.” 

“No. I remember. It wasn’t like that.”

Steve laughed. “What are you talking about? They were all mad about you, Buck! Every one of ‘em, I swear to God they were.”

“No. That’s – that’s not what I mean.”

Steve furrowed his brow. “Oh?” 

“I wasn’t trying to impress those girls. Well, maybe a little, but they weren’t my main audience. I don’t remember much, but I remember this. I swear it.” 

“I don’t understand.”

“Steve, I—” Bucky looked away, a flush creeping up his cheeks. “I wanted to impress _you_.” 

Steve laughed again. “Buck, that’s adorable, really, but are you sure? I already practically worshipped you, you know. I had no idea why you wanted to be my friend at all, and the fact that you actually wanted to be my best pal—”

“Fucking hell,” Bucky grumbled, his face turning redder still. 

“Excuse me?”

“Christ, I’m starting to remember how damn dense you are.”

“Me? Dense?”

Bucky gritted his teeth. “Yes, you.”

“I’m not dense. I think I’m actually pretty good at—”

“Oh, for _fuck’s sake_ , Steve. I wasn’t trying to impress you because I wanted to get you to be my _friend_. We were already best friends! I was trying to impress you because I wanted to be _more_ than just your friend!” 

Steve felt the blood rise into his face. _Maybe I am dense_ , he thought.


	7. Confessions

“You mean that you – you liked me like _that_?” Steve stammered. 

“‘Course I did. Do you think I remember any of those girls you just told me about?” He let out a snorting, bitter laugh. “No, you dummy. I remembered _you_. Even when I couldn’t figure out your name, even when I couldn’t quite picture your face, I knew. I knew what you meant to me.” 

Steve pinched the bridge of his nose between his steepled fingertips. “I never realized…”

“‘Course you didn’t,” Bucky muttered, ill-concealed bitterness thickening his voice. “Why the hell would you?”

Steve looked away, hoping Bucky wasn’t noticing the flush creeping up his cheeks. “I don’t know. I just figured that since you were my best friend and all, I’d just _know_ that sort of thing. I thought I’d know you better than that, I guess. Guess I wasn’t such a good friend after all.”

“Spare me the self-flagellation. It wasn’t like I went outta my way to tell you how I felt. Just the opposite, really,” said Bucky.

Steve swallowed, his throat tight. “I wish you’d told me, Buck.”

“Why?” Bucky asked, looking genuinely perplexed. 

Steve felt his cheeks begin to flush harder. “I guess I just… I wish I’d known.”

“Why?” Bucky asked, the question spitting sharp between his teeth. “Would you have forgotten me then, spared yourself all that trouble and pain?” 

“Jesus, Buck, no, not at all – God, how could you say those things – no, I would never! I would’ve wanted to know because you matter to me. You’ve always mattered. And I always wanna know how you’re feeling. Even if sometimes it’s… complicated.”

“That’s a nice word for it,” Bucky muttered ruefully.

“It _is_ complicated, Buck. But if you believe, even for one second, that I’d ever push you away because of it… well, I guess you don’t remember me at all.”

Bucky shrugged. “It was never just about how you might’ve felt. It was about everything. The whole goddamned world. It’s not like we could’ve had a future together,” Bucky sighed. “I don’t remember how people treated guys like me back in good ol’ Brooklyn, but I remember how I felt about it.”

“Oh?”

“I was ashamed. Like it was some kinda sin to love you, Stevie. I remember that.”

Steve felt tears begin to well up in his eyes, stinging as they weightlessly refused to fall. He wiped them away, droplets shuddering through the air between him and Bucky. 

“You’re crying,” Bucky murmured, his face falling. “Did I tell you something you didn’t want to know?” 

“No, Buck,” Steve replied. “It’s just… I never thought I’d hear anyone call me Stevie again.” 

“Why? It’s a perfectly good nickname.”

“You were the only one who kept calling me that after my ma died. When you fell, I just figured that I – I wasn’t gonna be Stevie to anyone anymore.” 

“Oh.” Bucky furrowed his brow. “You’re not angry?”

“Why on earth would I be angry?”

“Well, first of all, we’re not even _on earth_ right now—”

Steve groaned.

“And I mean,” Bucky continued, “I thought you might be angry to know. About how I felt about you. Are you angry?”

Steve shook his head, his mind replaying every time he’d caught himself admiring Bucky’s body and then looked away quickly, mortified. Every time he’d realized that he was looking at Bucky’s lips as he spoke instead of his eyes, wondering how they might feel against his own. Every time during the war that they’d shared a tent and slept huddled together for warmth, and he’d had to will himself to keep from wrapping his arms around Bucky’s lithe frame as he slept. 

“I’m not angry. Not even a little bit.” 

Bucky raised his eyebrows skeptically. 

“Really, Buck. I just want to know what you remember.”

Bucky looked away. “I remember being in the POW camp. I remember what Zola did to me there. It doesn’t seem fair, you know? I can remember every damn needle he stuck in me, but I can’t remember a damn thing about Coney Island. I should know by now that life was never gonna be fair. The only right thing, the only just thing in the world that I ever really knew, was that you were the one who got the serum.” 

Steve shook his head. “I wasn’t special. I was supposed to just be the first, they were gonna make lots more—”

“No! Stop it,” Bucky half-shouted. “You _were_ special, don’t you realize? And dammit, I woulda been jealous if I hadn’t spent my whole life wondering why nobody else but me seemed to notice that you were special.”

Steve bit his lip, trying to resist the urge to argue, to insist that he really was nothing special. Bucky’s glare told him to keep his mouth shut.

“Stevie, I remember that POW camp like it was yesterday. I thought I was gonna die there. I didn’t know the…” he glanced down at his left hand, metal glinting below the cuff of his jumpsuit, “The plans they had for me. I was ready, you know. I figured I’d had a pretty good run of it, given the fascists some hell, and now it was my time.” 

His voice quivered, and he paused. “But then… Then I heard your voice. You were shouting my name. I thought for sure I was gonna die then, that I was hallucinating the thing I wanted most of all, and that any second I was gonna slip away. But then you were standing over me, and you were so _real_ , and even though you looked like a whole ‘nother man than the one I’d left back home, I knew you in a second. Inside that new body, you were still my Stevie. And up into that moment, I swear to God I was ready to let go. But you were there, and suddenly I needed to hold on. I couldn’t die, because I’d be letting you down.”

“Oh, Buck…” Steve murmured.

“I had to hold on. For you,” Bucky continued, his voice shaking. “And God, you looked ridiculous, Stevie, with that prop shield hangin’ off your arm. That’s how I knew you were still the same inside. Cuz the guy I loved in Brooklyn woulda done just the same thing.”

Steve pushed gently with his feet against the wall, drifting slowly towards Bucky. He reached out his left hand, taking Bucky’s right hand into his grip. “I would do anything for you. Anything. If you remember one thing about me, please remember that.” 

“But why?” Bucky asked, pulling his hand out of Steve’s. “I don’t deserve it. The things HYDRA made me do… and the way I felt about you, it was all _wrong_ , it wasn’t _allowed_ …”

“I don’t care about what’s ‘allowed,’ Buck. If I did, I would never have tried to enlist, I would never have taken the serum. I wouldn’t be me.”

“What are you saying?”

“What do you _think_ I’m saying, Buck?”

Bucky shook his head. “I don’t know.” 

Steve took both Bucky’s wrists, flesh and metal, in his hands. Bucky’s eyes widened, and fear flashed in his eyes momentarily, then dissipated into bafflement. 

“And you say I’m the dense one, Buck,” Steve said. He drew his hands down against his hips, pulling Bucky against him, his mouth finding Bucky’s as they collided. 

It was only a kiss in the loosest definition of the word. Really, it was more of a slow-motion faceplant against each other. Bucky’s mouth was open in surprise, while Steve’s was pursed for a chaste peck, resulting in Steve landing the kiss on Bucky’s teeth more than his lips. But despite its fumbled execution, something between them softened and opened as their mouths parted. 

“Oh,” Bucky breathed, his eyes wide. 

“I’m sorry, Buck. I shoulda asked first, I wasn’t thinking—”

Before he could finish the sentence, Bucky’s lips were pressed against his own, soft and warm and urgent as they parted. Steve felt his body acquiescing to Bucky’s as if by some instinct he’d never known he had, his lips opening against Bucky’s, allowing the heat of their mouths to guide their kiss deeper, until Steve felt as though all of the galaxy was encapsulated within their embrace – Bucky’s arms around him were all the gravity he needed, his mouth was the warmth of the sun, each exploratory caress of tongue and movement of lips a blazing star. Steve wound the fingers of one hand into Bucky’s hair, his other hand taking the back of Bucky’s jumpsuit into his fist. Bucky arched his back and purred his pleasure against Steve’s mouth, and Steve felt as though he might burst with joy.

* * * 

Natasha made it nearly half a block before she heard the voices of the West German border guards, commanding her to halt. She paused, spun around slowly, raising her hands over her head. 

“Keep your hands over your head, miss.”

She nodded slowly. 

“It appears you caused quite the commotion at the border.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Did I?” 

“We need to see your papers.”

She gave the guard a small smile. “Well, I would, sir, but I’m afraid they’re all forged.”

He gave her a bewildered look. 

She shrugged. “I know you don’t typically get that answer so quickly. I figured I’d spare you the interrogation. I find interrogations boring, frankly. Look, I want you to take me in. So go ahead and arrest me.”

He gave her another look of disbelief. “I… suppose… I do? Put your hands behind your back.” 

She complied, and he clasped handcuffs onto her, the cold metal heavy against her wrist bones. She smiled to herself as he pushed her into a car, not even minding the discomfort of the cuffs pinching her skin. Sure, she was under arrest. But at least now she was choosing her path. And even though she didn’t know quite where she was going, or how she’d get there, she felt a strange sense of peace wash over her. 

She looked up out of the car window as it cruised down the Berlin streets, her gaze turned to the sky. Somewhere up there, Bucky was floating above her. _I hope you’re safe. And I hope you’re free,_ she prayed towards the clouds.


	8. Agreements

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry to keep you waiting! It's been a busy month-and-a-half for me, but I'm delighted to be back to writing! I hope anyone who's still reading enjoys this new chapter. Thanks for reading! <3

Natasha leaned her head against the window, the bumping of the car down the road rattling her teeth. She realized that she was tired. Every sense in her body had been dialed up during her escape, and now exhaustion had begun to catch up with her. She let her eyelids grow heavy and fall shut. She wouldn’t sleep – that would be too risky – but she could allow herself to dull her nerves a bit.

The sun had just begun to emerge from behind the clouds, glowing through her eyelids, when the car made a sharp turn into an underground garage. She opened her eyes slowly, careful not to reveal the wariness that jolted her wide awake. She’d expected to arrive at some sort of bland, official-looking immigration office and get carted off to a back room for questioning, but this place wasn’t like that.

She looked into the review mirror, making eye contact with the border guard as he took the car around the bend of the garage ramp, carrying them deeper underground. The bland bewilderment he’d worn earlier had been replaced with something more shrewd and frightening. 

As they descended another level, the guard slowed the car to a stop as a man appeared in the headlights. He wore a long, black coat and an eye patch, and his head was shaved bald, glinting darkly under the fluorescent lights. 

The guard got out of the driver’s seat and circled the car, opening Natasha’s door and pulling her to her feet outside the car. The man with the eye patch looked her up and down, then grinned. The smile didn’t put her at ease, however – his eye flashed with something almost predatory, as though he was a cat who’d just put his paw down on a mouse’s tail. She knew in that moment, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he was a spy of some kind. 

“Ms. Romanoff!” he spoke, his voice booming yet controlled, with a distinct American accent. “How pleasant of you to join us here today. Sorry about the theatrics,” he said, nodding at the border guard. “You’re a difficult woman to get in touch with, so when we heard you were crossing the Iron Curtain, we knew we’d need to do a little acting to get you in a room with me.”

“And who _are_ you, exactly?” she asked, her stomach sinking as she wondered if her flight across the border had all been for nothing. He could be anyone – CIA, a Soviet double agent, HYDRA… she had no way of knowing. 

“My name is Nick Fury. I’m with an agency called the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division. SHIELD, for short. We’re based out of the United States, but we do work all over the globe.”

“I know about SHIELD,” she said warily. 

“Of course you do!” he replied. “And we know about _you_ , Ms. Romanoff. We’ve been wanting to get in touch with you for a very long time.”

She raised an eyebrow. 

“Now don’t get too flattered,” the man said. “We’d gladly take any of your Black Widow comrades. But I have to admit, your dossier is… _exceptional_.” 

“I didn’t leave the East just to do more of the same dirty work in the West,” she replied. 

“Of course you didn’t. But a spider such as yourself can’t just go leaving the web just like that,” he said, snapping his fingers. 

“So what is it that you want from me?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” he said with a laugh. “I want you in SHIELD!” 

“No, thank you,” she said, firmly. “I’m done with the spy games. I just want to be left alone.”

The man began to laugh, a deep, highly amused belly laugh that made Natasha’s blood boil. She glared at him as his guffaws subsided into chuckles. “Ms. Romanoff, you’re killing me,” he finally spoke. “Do you really _believe_ that?”

She stared daggers at him in response. 

“You realize you’re not the first of your kind to run, right?” he asked. “And you’d hardly be the first to refuse my offer, either. I’ve talked to plenty of women like you, graduates of the Red Room. They come to the West and imagine a world of freedom and blue jeans and Coca-Cola. Maybe they end up joining a ballet company, maybe they find a husband. And things are great, for a while. But eventually the other foot comes down. The ballerina winds up mysteriously dead one day because she forgot to watch her back, and he brand-new understudy showed up to rehearsal with a vial of poison and a loyalty to the Red Room. Or the woman’s husband decides that he wants kids after all, and the doctor explains _why_ they just can’t get pregnant, and suddenly that raises all kinds of questions. The doctor makes a few calls about the situation and suddenly men with guns are at your door in the night. You can run, Ms. Romanoff. But you’d better not stop. Because if you let down your guard for a second, they’ll come for you. They’ll never let you rest. Never.” 

She frowned, twisting her wrists against the handcuffs. “And what do you have to offer me?” she asked. 

“Protection. Amnesty in the United States. A noble purpose. A cool uniform. The works.”

“And what do I give you in return?” she asked.

“That’s easy, Ms. Romanoff. You just keep doing spy shit. But you do it for SHIELD.” 

“What kind of spy shit?” she asked suspiciously. Her mind replayed all the violence she’d done, all the evil she’d been forced to carry out. She didn’t want to relive it all again for a different organization in a different country. 

“Well, your first mission will be an extraction. We’re dealing with a… situation right now in the United States. There’s a rogue agent in the field, and he’s a very _important_ agent. We believe we know what compromised him, and we think we know what can get him back into the fold. And frankly, we think you’re the only one for the job.” 

“And why is that?” she asked. 

“Because you’re one of the only people alive today outside of HYDRA who knows a certain James Buchanan Barnes, codename Winter Soldier.” 

Her eyes widened. “What’s Bucky got to do with this?” 

“Because he’s why our agent went rogue. Unfortunately, we didn’t know that the Winter Soldier and Sergeant Barnes were one and the same until Rogers went rogue, but once the pieces started to fit together… well, it all made sense.”

She shook her head. “And you want me to…?” she trailed off. 

“Extract them both.”

“And neither of them will get hurt?” She wasn’t going to agree to anything if it meant Bucky was going to come to harm. 

“You have my word,” he replied. “Sergeant Barnes is technically a POW. And if the recent events up there have been any indication, he’s not as thoroughly brainwashed as HYDRA thought he was. And we’re sure as hell not getting Rogers back if we don’t take Barnes, too.” 

She stood silently, considering her options. 

“So what’s it gonna be?” he asked. “Run forever, or give your friend a chance to escape HYDRA forever?” 

She sighed. “Alright. I’m in.” 

“Fantastic!” he said, clapping his hands. 

_Fucking fantastic_ , she thought to herself resignedly.

* * *

_I want this to last forever_ , Steve thought to himself as his mouth moved against Bucky’s, feeling the rough scratch of Bucky’s stubble against his smooth-shaven chin. Bucky pulled him closer, their bodies entwined and suspended far above the world. Steve felt the chill of Bucky’s metal hand through his jumpsuit, the raw power of the steel driving a shiver up his spine. He knew that whatever had happened to get Bucky that arm, it must’ve been terrible. And he knew that the things Bucky had done with that arm… well, he wouldn’t think about it too much. But the sheer strength of it, the way it moved like flesh but clicked and hissed with its internal mechanisms—

Bucky pulled his mouth away from Steve’s, looking into his eyes. “I need you to understand something,” he said, his tone serious and his brows furrowed.

“Yes?” Steve replied, breathless from kissing. 

“I’m not the same man who fought with you and the Howlies. I need you to know that.”

“I know, Buck.”

“I’ve done things that can’t be forgiven. You need to realize that. You’re Captain America, Steve. You’re as good as they get. And I’m… not.”

“But what you did wasn’t _you_! They _made_ you do it.” 

“Yeah. But I was _good_ at it. And they picked me because they knew I’d be good at it.”

“Buck…” Steve whispered sadly. 

“When I remembered you – when they hadn’t just wiped me – I’d always think about how funny it was. Two guys from Brooklyn, and we ended up bein’ just the same, but opposites.” 

Steve frowned. 

“I mean,” continued Bucky, “We were both _chosen_. It’s just that Erskine picked you, and Zola picked me. Took my mind, gave me this thing,” he glanced down at his left arm, wrinkling his nose at it.

Steve reached out, brushing his fingers lightly down the glinting forearm; each fine seam in the metal felt like a valley now that his senses were aroused from their kiss. “I can tell that you hate it, Buck… but I… I don’t,” Steve confessed. 

Bucky gave him a confused look.

“It’s just…” Steve began, swallowing nervously before he tried to explain. “HYDRA gave it to you, I know. And I hate HYDRA more than I hate anything. They’re everything I enlisted to fight against. But… it’s just an arm. A very powerful, very well-made prosthetic. And just because HYDRA gave it to you doesn’t mean you have to let them own it forever. It’s part of _you_ , not them. You don’t have to let them keep owning you.” 

Bucky shook his head and looked away. “It’s never gonna feel like it’s really mine. It’s just this… thing that’s attached to me. That they attached to me.”

Steve traced his fingers down the wrist of the arm, then took the back of the wrist in his other hand, letting his fingers caress down the steel palm, smoothing the fingers out of their fist and into an open hand. “I don’t know, Buck. It moves just like you do.”

Bucky grimaced. 

“I do have one question about it,” Steve said, his voice low and cautious. 

Bucky’s eyes flicked up, looking into Steve’s. 

“Can it feel?” 

Bucky nodded. “Not like a real arm could, but… yeah. It doesn’t pick up hot or cold, but it can sense pressure. I don’t know how it works. It’s not like I coulda asked my handlers to explain it to me. But it does sense things. If something’s touching it, I know. Just like if it were a real arm, only… pricklier, somehow? Electrical? I dunno how to explain it…” he trailed off. 

“Can you feel my hands right now?” Steve asked. 

Bucky nodded. 

“Does it feel… good?” Steve asked. 

Bucky hesitated, his eyes briefly flashing with that scared, animal look Steve had seen through his helmet as they’d fought outside. “Y-yes,” he finally stammered. 

“Is that okay, Buck?” Steve asked. 

“‘Course it is. It’s just that nothing – not that arm, not my body, not my mind, not a goddamn thing – has been _mine_. Not for years, Stevie. And I haven’t had someone touch me like… like this… since before the train.” 

Steve felt a blush creeping up his cheeks. “I want to help you remember. Not just your memories, but your…” Steve could feel himself turning brighter and brighter pink, “Your body.” 

Bucky nodded. “I’d like that.”

Steve’s eyes focused on Bucky’s kissed-red lips as he spoke, his heart still pounding from the thrill of feeling Bucky’s mouth against his own. It took all the willpower he had to keep talking, instead of pulling himself in for another few minutes of hungry kisses. But he wanted more than kisses. And it seemed that Bucky did, too. And if he wanted more, he’d have to ask for it. 

“And I want to help you live with your arm,” said Steve, flushing deeper still. 

Bucky let out a sigh. “And how’re you gonna do that?” 

“I have a few ideas,” said Steve. “But I need you to trust me, okay?”

Bucky huffed skeptically. 

“Please, Buck. It’ll be fun, I promise. And we can stop whenever you say so.”

“Fine.” 

“Okay. First, I want you to close your eyes.”

“ _Close my eyes?_ ”

“C’mon, Buck. Just trust me.” 

Bucky huffed again, but closed his eyes anyway. “You’re a goddamn punk, you know that?” 

“Now there’s an insult I haven’t heard since the War,” Steve said with a grin. 

“I dunno what you’ve got planned, Rogers, but get on with it. The suspense is killing me!” Bucky grumbled. 

“Okay, okay. Just keep your eyes closed.” Steve let a grin spread across his blushing face, even though Bucky’s squeezed-shut eyes couldn’t see it.


End file.
